Running Rewired_ Reinvent Your Run for Stability, Strength, and Speed_clone

Copyright © 2017 by Jay Dicharry All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by VeloPress. CrossFit® is a registered trademark of CrossFit, Inc. Ironman® is a registered trademark of World Triathlon Corporation 3002 Sterling Circle, Suite 100 Boulder, CO 80301–2338 USA VeloPress is the leading publisher of books on endurance sports. Focused on cycling, triathlon, running, swimming, and nutrition/diet, VeloPress books help athletes achieve their goals of going faster and farther. Preview books and contact us at velopress.com. Distributed in the United States and Canada by Ingram Publisher Services The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Name: Dicharry, Jay, author. Title: Running rewired: reinvent your run for stability, strength & speed / Jay Dicharry. Description: Boulder, CO: VeloPress, 2017. | Includes index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017049243 (print) | LCCN 2017049506 (ebook) | ISBN 9781948006019 (ebook) | ISBN 9781937715755 (pbk.: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Running—Training. | Running—Physiological aspects. Classification: LCC GV1061.5 (ebook) | LCC GV1061.5 .D53 2017 (print) | DDC 796.42—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049243 Cover design by Kevin Roberson Cover photograph by Tim De Frisco Interior photographs by Jeff Clark Illustrations by Charlie Layton Location courtesy of Kevin Boss, Boss Sports Performance v. 3.1

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To my kids, my future is happier with you To my wife, who always looks for the positive To my parents, for providing support and opportunity To my mentors, who pushed me To my friends, who let me be myself To chocolate, for being delicious To the musicians of my hometown, NOLA, your music moves us

CONTENTS Introduction: Setting Yourself Up for Success PART I: THE RATIONALE 1 Think Backward to Run Forward 2 Troubleshoot Broken Wiring 3 Mobility and Stability for Runability 4 Your Body Drives Your Form PART II: DRIVE YOUR RUN WITH PRECISION + PERFORMANCE 5 Don’t Break Your Pivot Point 6 The Secret of Counter-Rotation 7 Push for Better Propulsion 8 Alignment Is Not One-Size-Fits-All 9 Build a Bigger Spring PART III: THE RUNNING REWIRED PROGRAM 10 A Master Plan to Master Running Drill Work Precision Workouts Performance Strength Workouts Performance Power Workouts

Acknowledgments References Index About the Author

INTRODUCTION

Setting Yourself Up for Success There’s that feeling that you get after you crush a workout, hit a new PR on race day, or beat your friend to the top of the local hill or high alpine peak. It’s a feeling of success . . . and it feels good, really good. We thrive on challenge, and train in pursuit of this feeling of success. Every runner knows that it takes a lot of hard work to get there. But a lot of runners get confused by this concept: They end up interpreting “a lot of hard work” to mean “a high volume of work.” In the quest to log the miles it’s easy to lose sight of the quality of those miles. First place isn’t awarded to the person who racks up the highest weekly mileage or trains the hardest. Instead, medals adorn the necks of those who nail the fundamentals, which in turn allows them to train consistently and successfully. You’ve got to put in the miles to get fit, but how can you be sure that your training is setting you up for success? Put simply, there are things that all runners of all abilities should be doing outside running to improve their running. If you want to run better, you need to move better. Discussions about “running better” invariably seem to lead to the topic of form, but before we go there let’s take a step back and look at reality. How you run is an expression of you and your experience. You probably aren’t a Tarahumara Indian and you probably aren’t a Kenyan. We all envy the perfect posture, leg drive, and effortlessly springy gait of these runners. That idealized stride wasn’t a result of being born at elevation or bestowed with great genetics —it was built through skilled movement. It was lifestyle that wired these runners’ bodies for postural alignment and efficient muscle recruitment, first as children playing in the field, later working in those fields, and eventually through a lot of hard training that led them to beat the entire field. If we consider how a lifestyle structured around physical activity and progressive running factors in, it’s not the case that the Kenyan and Tarahumara cultures are “born to run”; rather, their bodies have “adapted to run.” Conversely, it should come as no surprise that our own lifestyle, built around modern conveniences and topped off with a bunch of running, doesn’t produce the same results.

Training to move better Movement skill is critical. Athletes competing in ball sports spend the bulk of their time training their bodies to move better. Through practice they build a strategy that can be put to use every time they step onto the turf, field, or court. They know how to execute good form before the first ball is put into play. Fighter pilots refine their reflexes until they reach a point where they can fly intuitively. Your 105-pound neighbor can nail yoga poses you’ve only seen in pictures, not because she’s strong, but because she’s skilled. You don’t step into the huddle, into a cockpit, or into a one-handed handstand on the yoga mat until you have a baseline of skill preparation. Likewise, highly efficient runners have mastered the skill of running. The legendary running coach Joe Vigil once said, “It’s hard being a running coach because the kids who show up for practice are highly motivated, but they are the same kids that lacked the athleticism to make the team in [insert sport-of- choice].” These kids are steeped in the promise that work ethic can beat talent given enough time and determination—they get out of bed, lace up their shoes, and run. Sometimes they run easy, sometimes hard, and sometimes even harder. Many of them end up running themselves into the ground, missing peak potential, or worse yet, missing training due to injury. But harder doesn’t mean better and volume doesn’t make champions. There are specific skills that you should have in your running toolbox. The repetitive nature of running means that many of us take a body that really doesn’t know how to move at its best and rack up the mileage. Through years of repetition you wire your body to move one way and run one way. Then when someone comes along and tells you that you need to improve your form, or move a different way, you can’t simply do what they are saying. You haven’t built the muscle memory to move differently. Even subtle changes to your running form feel awkward and hard. You can’t help but notice that your form still looks nothing like that of the Kenyans. And your times aren’t improving. A lot of runners have conducted this experiment and failed, concluding that focusing on form is a waste of time. Well, there is a better way to run better. It starts with this little secret: Your body drives your running form. The old adage says “form follows function.” Likewise, running form follows body function. Running better requires you to move better. Under stress. Under fatigue. And under the hot sun with your archrival breathing down your neck. In these moments, you don’t have the luxury of going over an eight-point mental

checklist on running form and body awareness. You should have learned that routine a long time ago. If not, that time begins now. Think about where you are right now as a runner, and where you’d like to be. Everyone wants running to feel smooth, efficient, and less stressful. To hit that goal requires you to train in a way that is more well rounded and more athletic— but always with the intention of specifically improving your running. We are all busy, and adding more to what you are already doing can seem like a big ask. But this process will be fun, because you’ll feel yourself improving in ways you’ve never experienced. We’ll explore specific strategies to improve your movement and re-invent your run.

A study of one The science of training is evolving. It’s only been in the past 20–30 years that we have had access to the tools and technology to further our understanding of the body and create progress in sports science. Now we have labs to do research, people with lots of letters behind their names, and coaches who are hungry to find better ways for their athletes to train. And what difference has it made? Records are falling faster than rain. Look at any sport and you’ll see a sharp spike in performance gains over the past three decades. Decades ago, people just ran. When we found out how effective intervals are at improving physiological performance capacity, they became standard practice. Theory changes. Science changes. And if you harness this knowledge and change your training, ultimately your running times can change. There are a few things you need to know to get more out of the science on training. First, it remains the case that most of the research on running is focused on injury prevention, and there’s been a definitive evolution in how we treat running injuries in recent years. We have better information, which means you can have better results. But when we survey the research on running performance, we face a harder task. Most of the running performance studies involve either elite runners or college kids who play video games for several hours a day and get bonus points for showing up to be a research subject. Unless you are an elite runner or a couch-potato college student, these results may not accurately apply to you. To evolve running performance, we need to look comprehensively at the research being done both inside and outside of running. The fields of biomechanics research, motor control, generalized strength and conditioning research, and yes, even bodybuilding make up a vast body of research that translates to running performance. We will draw on this science to learn how to move better. To be effective, research needs to be translated to your individual needs. In my work as a physical therapist and researcher, I consider each runner as a unique case study. I begin by asking a simple question: How can I set up this runner for success? It’s my job to pinpoint problems that cause those running ouches and plug the holes in a runner’s performance potential. I’ve conducted musculoskeletal examinations and high-tech gait lab assessments on thousands of runners in my career. While this book is no substitute for a one-on-one running gait lab examination, there is a pattern to the problems that plague runners. I can say with confidence that you will benefit from fixing your own

imbalances to ensure that you put the best you into every run. I’ve taken advantage of the research that’s out there, along with my own observations, and conducted some of my own tests in the lab to see what kind of efforts build more durable and better runners. I know that if I can give you the tools to create a more durable body that can resist the stress of running, you can push the boundaries of your own physical performance.

Running versus practicing It obviously takes time and practice to refine your craft. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell explains the theory that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to be the best. It’s human nature to zero in on the total amount of time practiced and start logging the hours. This is a big mistake, particularly when it comes to running. Practicing the same thing over and over again just reinforces your current movement patterns. Adding more volume of less-than-perfect movement means you get really good at moving poorly. What you practice and how you practice it makes all the difference. To run better we have to realize that running is a skill. And skilled running stems from practicing skilled movement. Gladwell’s book was largely based on the work of psychologist Anders Ericsson, who categorized practice as purposeful and deliberate. Purposeful practice is kind of like running. Your training plan tells you to run, so you run. You keep logging more volume, heartbeats, and mileage in your black box in pursuit of a certain goal, but the target is usually set on a specific time or distance. This approach doesn’t exactly make you a better runner. You don’t get better at running in a way that avoids injury. You don’t optimize your stride to your full performance potential. Instead, you keep turning up the volume, hoping to hear that magic song that inspires you to a new PR. Most runners just want to run, but that’s not likely to make you better at running. And that’s where a different type of practice comes in. Ericsson describes deliberate practice as doing a specific task with the intent of improving performance. To get better at running, you must first understand the sport so you can identify the sport-specific skills that are critical to improving. Then, you need a formal plan of attack to develop those skills. And then there’s ongoing work to continue to improve and refine those skills. For a runner, deliberate practice entails taking specific actions to improve durability and economy, and this doesn’t always involve running. Instead of asking you to run more, I’m asking you to start a plan to move better. With deliberate practice the neurophysiology in your brain will adapt and rewire its strategy for running. We’ll tackle the what, why, and how to change your body and improve your movement so you can be a more durable runner and increase your capacity to run efficiently. We will build your proficiency at these skills, effectively rewiring how your body moves so you can run better. It’s a big promise, and it does require a commitment from you: You will need to fit at least two additional workouts into your weekly training schedule.

I know your time is valuable. If a lack of time is your primary obstacle, I will reassure you that it’s well worth the investment. Virtually every runner I’ve ever met would be better served dropping one run a week and adding some skill work. If you’ve got the time, simply add this plan on top of your running. Maybe you are still unconvinced. But what if I told you that it’s possible to craft a body that moves well, under control, in the most efficient way possible? Imagine what it would feel like to develop a running gait that is more symmetrical and less stressful. The promise of improved joint health and faster running times is hard to resist. There are no shortcuts to get you there. But if you are ready to invest some hard work and be consistent with your training, this plan will bring you success. Research shows us that people stick to plans when they understand “the why.” Let’s learn more about what happens to you as you run, and how the Running Rewired program will take you and your running to the next level.

Part I The Rationale

1 Think Backward to Run Forward We all need to be students of our sport. For some of us, it’s been a while since we sat in a classroom. But you can probably recall that being a successful student requires that you know what’s going to be on the test. When you know that much, you know how to prepare and what to study. Well, class is in session: What does running test? When you run, each stride tests your body. If we understand the specific problems or challenges that we face as runners we can work backward from there and establish a plan to be better prepared. I’m sure you’d be happier with an A on your running report card, right? Let’s look at what you need to do to prepare your body to run better—the right work done at the right time and in the right dose—to maximize your results. WHAT REALLY HAPPENS WHEN YOU RUN The thrill of running can distract us from the reality of what is happening to the body with every stride. Your heart beats harder, pumping blood throughout the body. Sweat drips down your forehead as your body temperature rises. You feel the wind on your face as you turn round the track, up the trail, or down the road. These are the images that running conjures up in our heads and they are real, but while your heart and lungs are driving your engine toward redline, your chassis is under a lot of stress. Like it or not, your body must deal with 2.5 to 3 times its body weight with every single stride. Think about this for a minute. If you stand up on both legs, you have half your body weight on each leg. And if you stand on one leg, that’s 100 percent of your body weight on one leg. Now take a barbell, add about 150 percent of your body weight to it, and hoist the load up

and onto your shoulders; then stand on one leg. Like it or not, this is how much stress your bones, tendons, muscles, cartilage, and ligaments support with every single stride you take. As runners, we’ve been told that distance running is a small amount of stress applied to your body for a long period of time. Well, we just shot that idea into oblivion. If anything, we could say that running is large stresses acting on our body for a long time. Further complicating matters, running isn’t just a single-plane sport. In addition to these vertical forces, we also have to deal with braking and acceleration forces that amount to 40 to 50 percent of our body’s weight. And that’s while our body is kicked laterally by forces of around 15 percent body weight just from the effort of running. Running creates huge amounts of stress that act on the body from all sides with each and every step. No wonder running is hard! This load acting on your body is absolute and somewhat mechanical. But your body’s response isn’t just mechanical. Imagine a rubber ball. If you throw a rubber ball off the roof, it will first accelerate to the ground. When it collides with the ground, the energy of the impact will flatten the ball out a bit and then the ball will rebound off the ground and spring back up again. The ball is passive —it compresses and rebounds based on the density of the rubber from which it is

made. This is a simple illustration of how a passive object responds to load. Now imagine you are soaring through the air in mid-stride and the same gravity that accelerated the rubber ball takes you back to earth. That’s where the similarity ends, because the body isn’t passive. It’s a complex system of parts with a neuromuscular system that actively moves, adjusts, and coordinates these parts in response to the mechanical forces of running.

YOUR MOVEMENT SYSTEM There are three basic systems that you use for active movement. You have joint structures, muscles, and a brain. Alone, these parts can do nothing, and together they can break world records. Joint structures: The mechanical parts of your body are like doors and hinges. Your bones have structure, and each of these bones connects to other bones through a joint. The joints are lined with cartilage, a cool material that cushions and lubricates the bones as they move, and the bones are connected by ligaments, which tie one bone to the other. All of these support parts are important, but they are just passive pulleys and levers. That is, they can’t move on their own. Doors and hinges don’t move on their own either. Muscles: This is where the work gets done. To get the door to open on its hinge requires a force to open or close it. Muscles provide this force generation for our body. They allow one joint to move on another or stabilize a joint while motion occurs somewhere else. Brain: We have joints that provide structure, and we’ve got muscles that create force to move the joints, but we need something to tell those parts to move. This is where your brain comes in. Actually, it’s not just your brain, but your entire nervous system. Think of it as a computer that is wired to a network of muscles. But the incredible thing about our nervous system is that it’s not just an on/off switch. It modulates the force we create. When your brain tells your muscles to generate force to open the door, your brain adjusts how much force is needed based on the weight of the door, whether it’s dragging on the carpet, or if it’s sticking in the doorjamb. This amount of control allows us not just to move, but to move with precision.

With each and every stride, these systems all talk to each other. The mechanical load accelerating you down to earth stimulates a chain of events. While your joints can’t move on their own, they can sense compression and movement. They send signals out to your neuromuscular system, calling for action. Your brain triggers the muscles to generate a certain amount of force at just the right time. Your muscles get this message and do the work they were told. They pull on the joints to create motion. And then there’s cross talk among the parts as well. Your muscles sense a change in length and relay info to your brain to make sure that you don’t strain them. The joints relay information to your brain since the amount of muscle force they need changes as they arc through their range of motion. This cross talk is essentially a system of checks and balances to make sure things are going well. If done correctly, your body produces a net mechanical force that is just enough to counter the mechanical load trying to squash you down like a pancake. If all goes well, you just took one single stride. Nice job. Now all you have to do is sustain this for several thousand strides on today’s run. better body input = better output PROGRAMMING QUALITY MOVEMENT

These three systems run a program over and over with each stride you take. Each element in the system has specific inputs and outputs to modify the quality of your stride. This is what’s missing from our understanding of running. Runners have an unrelenting focus on volume. More miles per week obviously puts more mechanical load on your joints. It’s the body’s job to produce a controlled and efficient response, rising to the challenge and controlling your body. A poor movement program equates to poor body control. When the body becomes overwhelmed by the demands of running it sets us up for injury or leads to compromised performance. Specifically, it is how we deal with the mechanical demands of running that dictates how well we perform. The two big questions are: 1. Is your movement safe? What type of movement skill and body awareness do you bring to running? 2. Is your movement efficient? Could you rewire the way you move to drive you forward with less effort and less form breakdown during your runs? An efficient movement program improves the quality of your stride for long- term joint health and efficiency. Just as we can adjust the quantity of our running volume, we can learn to improve the quality of our running volume. Your brain learns through movement and awareness to know when, how much, and how fast to drive your legs. You can improve your skills by better understanding the input your brain is receiving and rewiring your movement program to get your legs moving more safely and efficiently. Dynamic plastic What’s my favorite thing to eat? Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. You didn’t know that 5 seconds ago, but you do now. Do you know how you learned to swim? Do you know how the brain recovers after a stroke? The answers to these questions have one thing in common: neural plasticity. Your brain is capable of learning. Not just rote memorization, but actually learning how to do new things at any age! When you learn, your brain makes new connections from one cell to another. The more you practice, the more robust these connections become. It’s the old practice makes perfect thing. Your nerves are literally building skill by laying down connectivity from nerve to nerve. The wires that connect your systems are dynamic. They adjust their signals depending on your needs. Running on asphalt, concrete, grass, and over trail

irregularities present different inputs, and all require different outputs in terms of muscle action and timing. Changing pace requires modifications as well. Your nervous system makes all of the necessary adjustments behind the scenes. The same thing happens when you get a new pair of shoes—your body makes slight changes to account for the new environment your foot now sits on. All of this learning that your body does to account for these differences is evidence that it can also learn and adapt to run better. The Running Rewired program uses neural plasticity to train your body to run with more control for better durability and better performance. Moving with precision and force A lot of coaches will tell you that runners self-select their own efficient running form. Well, kind of. There’s optimal form, which we’ll call Plan A. And then there’s making the best of what you’ve got, or Plan B. Most runners figure out how to compensate for any shortcomings in their current make-up of mobility, stability, strength, and power. In other words, your brain’s ability to adapt is being hijacked by your body and its limitations. You refine and practice Plan B over years of purposeful practice. Plan B can certainly get the job done to log your miles. But I’d argue that Plan B is second rate. It’s not my intention to come at you with guns a-blazing and tell you everything you know about running is wrong, but given the fact that your brain can be rewired and your running form can actually change, why not work on recovering your own personal Plan A? Movements that feel awkward today can become instinctual. Through deliberate practice, Plan A can also become instinctual. Settle for Plan B and you will leave performance on the table because Plan B stops short of harnessing your durability or capacity. If you have problems or injuries that affect the way you run, it’s time to fix them. Take your aching back and painful knees and throw 35–50 miles a week at them, and running won’t help. Neither would soccer, basketball, or ice hockey. Placing a huge load on top of existing problems only makes things worse. Your injury cycles demand rest time that prevents consistent training. Break the cycle. You don’t need to be a freak of nature to be successful, but you do need to improve your movement quality. There’s another issue I frequently see in runners that compromises movement. Many will tell me, “I can’t jump.” Here’s what this really means: “I can’t coordinate my body well enough to deliver a solid chunk of force down to the floor to blast me up and forward against gravity.” This is a big problem

because this is exactly what running demands of us. In fact, research shows that people who drive more force down to the ground in a shorter period of time run faster. Period. Every runner, at every level, can train and improve this skill. We are going to open up the black box of running and establish a system for making you a better runner. Your body drives your running form. Build a better body and you will improve your running form. By focusing on the specific skills that improve running, you can move with precision and strengthen your spring. To move with precision you need enough mobility to move unencumbered and enough stability to control the path your body takes over each mile. Building the skills of mobility and stability will reduce your “stress per stride” and ensure your body symmetry is dialed. Moving better makes you more durable as a runner, which allows your training to be more consistent. A stronger spring leads to better performance because your ability to deliver more oomph down to the ground makes for a faster stride. The Running Rewired Workouts act as a step- by-step program to change your body and evolve your running.

2 Troubleshoot Broken Wiring Imagine you are out on a beautiful trail run with your buddy Wes. You are talking to Wes about the vacation you are planning, but all he wants to talk about is the fact that his right IT (iliotibial) band is killing him. He tried the foam roller but that didn’t help. He got a massage last week; that didn’t help either. You fade back to take a look at his stride and notice that his right knee is collapsing inward. You tell Wes to steer his leg straight. But Wes has no idea how to correct this problem. So he overcompensates by forcing his knees outward. Now he’s running on the outsides of his feet and that hurts his feet. Running this way feels strange, and it’s much harder, and Wes becomes frustrated. The real problem is that Wes’s hip is collapsing inward. Most people would think that this is due to muscle weakness, and that is a possibility. But for the vast majority of runners, there’s something else entirely different going on. Systems don’t work when they aren’t plugged in. Most runners’ hip muscles are inhibited, or unplugged. Put simply, you can’t make toast if your toaster isn’t plugged in. Likewise, your hip muscles won’t turn on unless you teach them to connect with your brain. Personal trainers often make the claim that heavy squats fix everything. I couldn’t disagree more. Cramming more bread into a toaster that isn’t plugged in won’t fix the problem. Squatting with 200 pounds won’t fix your issues because your body will just shift load to other muscles and continue to compensate. Likewise, if you pile running volume on top of inhibited hips, it doesn’t help because running and strength aren’t the problem. Your body is the problem. To plug the muscle back in, we need to teach it to work and coordinate it with the rest of the body. Recently a runner came to see me with hip pain. It wasn’t bad enough to

keep her from running, but it was consistently there. Her coach and friends had told her to strengthen her glutes, so she began going to a Butts and Guts class every week. What was the net impact after two years? Nothing—she saw zero improvement. Her strength training class couldn’t fix the problem; in fact, it was throwing still more load on top of her problem. Her body had learned to cheat the movement and move more weight on the bar, but she couldn’t move better. And none of the time she invested had helped her running stride. We took a step back and cleaned up her movement problems. Within three weeks she was symptom-free and set a PR in the half-marathon. When she returned to those classes, she had better movement and she could see the results. When you move correctly, you move at your best. And most importantly, your body learns skills that improve your running. DON’T SETTLE FOR PLAN B Good runners have a gait that is instinctively smooth. With each stride, brain and body deliver an optimal stride. These athletes have trained to develop a “Plan A” strategy to move and run as efficiently as they can. Runners look to the elites for advice on how to improve their own form. It’s frustrating when putting advice into action doesn’t play out so well when the foot hits the ground. Let’s take a step back and look at how our bodies learn to move, and how your own learned movements may be the biggest block to realizing your best run. For best results, we have to practice quality movement, but the quality of your correct movement is only as good as your body allows it to be. Case in point: Our friend Wes would like to clean up his gait. But he doesn’t bring a perfect body to running. And his work lifestyle doesn’t help. He sits on planes for more hours at a stretch than some people sleep at night, and then he sits more in meetings all day. Sitting can corrupt posture, effectively shutting off or inhibiting the core and hip muscles. Also, Wes has an old injury that makes his right ankle joint stiff. The tightness in his hips prevents him from getting a good push-off so his leg swings farther in front of his body and less behind. This shift in stride overworks the muscles around the knee, so that they’re not capable of steering the leg straight, and that makes running more stressful on his body. And the stiffness in his right ankle shifts him to the outside of his foot with each and every step, which imparts yet more wobble to the path of his leg swinging through space. Wes wants to improve his control while running. But with so many factors at

work, his body has resorted to Plan B. Wes has adapted to his problems by jerry- rigging his gait. Wes is not the only one—evolution has programmed us to figure out the most energy-efficient way to walk and run. Wes’s body has compensated and rewired his gait reflex to make it as efficient as possible within his body’s current limitations. The body gets good at what it practices, and with each run, Wes continued to engrain a compensated gait thanks to his stiff ankle and unplugged hips. And then one day, Wes sought some help from his friend at the gym. He got all sorts of advice to help improve motion, and after a few months’ time, his hip and ankle motion improved a lot. But Wes’s running form didn’t change a bit. Why? You can have better mobility, but your body has to know how to use it. It takes practice to integrate new movement into your brain’s programming. If you want to do that, you’ve got to rewire the way you move.

REWIRING REFLEXIVE MOVEMENT Scratch your nose. It’s easy—just do it right now. What happened? You read a command. Your brain agreed. It sent a message to the muscles in your arm to lift your hand, bring it to your face, precisely find the location on your face where the nose is, and wiggle the fingers to create movement and scratch. That’s a lot of steps just to scratch your nose, isn’t it? All of this occurred through something called voluntary movement. You made a conscious decision to move and your brain carried out the task. Now, get up, walk to the end of the room, and then back. Once again, your brain made a voluntary decision to give this a try. You got up and started to walk. But after that, things went very differently. With each step you flexed your hip up, extended the knee, swung the lower leg through, let a foot fall to the floor, rolled through the ankle, pushed through the calf to propel the body, and then repeated. This happened, but you didn’t think through it. Gait is not voluntary, but rather reflexive. Reflexive movements occur without conscious thought. In fact, the signals that bounce around your body telling you to crawl, walk, and run are carried out by a special program called your central pattern generators, or CPGs. The key thing to understand is that these CPGs are located under the brain in the spinal cord, and this is why gait doesn’t require focused brainpower. Since conscious thought originates in our brain, in a way, it’s like running in your subconscious. Every step you take reinforces your gait pattern, whether it’s best for you or not. Sometimes aches and pains you’ve accumulated along your running career result in a limp that is noticeable to your friends, but not to you—it just feels normal. The CPGs learn from all the practice you do in a repetitive movement like gait, and practice builds connectivity. Sure, it is possible to overpower this reflex. If you want, you can push off harder on your left leg versus your right, but this would require brainpower because you would be modifying the normal reflexive pattern of gait sent out via the CPGs in your spinal cord.

This is why changing running form can be hard. Trying to hit perfect form with your less-than-perfect body results in you fighting your own movement. If you have ever tried to change your cadence, you know this firsthand. Running along at 162 steps per minute for eight years and then trying to hit 180 steps per minute will require huge effort on the part of your brain. You can’t make that shift quickly. The same goes for posture. How can a runner “stand tall” for a half-marathon when she has no idea how to find a neutral spine position when she is standing still? Still, there are plenty of running coaches out there telling people to shorten their contact time on the ground to run faster. This advice started with an experiment with a group of the best runners in the United States. They were told to shorten their contact time during all their runs, but this required completely reorganizing how hard they pushed down on each and every stride. Even though

these were elite bodies, they had no idea how to actually do this and forced huge changes in muscle recruitment and intensity. It was a total disaster that resulted in every single runner being injured. Reducing contact time will make you faster, but your body has to be trained how to do this properly before you can expect it to integrate and improve your gait. You can make changes in your running form, but good form is not going to happen in one session with one cue. Your body needs to build a database of proper muscle memory. Once your body has “been there” it can easily find its way back, just like riding a bike. Neural Plasticity Many years ago, I experienced a severe head injury that put me in a coma for a while. The swelling shifted parts of my brain that are normally on the top of the skull to be down below it, and my spinal cord was compressed. When I was released from the hospital, I couldn’t walk in a straight line down the sidewalk. The trauma my brain and spinal cord sustained made it impossible for me to maintain balance and coordination. I remember having to think about walking in a way I never did before my injury. Since the normal reflexive message coming out of my spinal cord was damaged, voluntary commands from my brain were required. And I practiced walking . . . a lot. Eventually my brain and the CPGs in my spinal cord got together and wrote a new program. My brain went back to thinking about other stuff, gait became automatic and reflexive again, and I could walk straight on the sidewalk. Don’t worry, I’m fine now, but it goes to show that plasticity is real: It’s entirely possible to learn how to improve the way you move. BUILDING MUSCLE MEMORY When Wes came to see me we found out that his external rotators, which are responsible for steering the hips, were unplugged. Through treatment, Wes learned how to feel and engage his hip muscles through a very isolated

movement. Initially, he couldn’t carry a conversation while doing it—while not hard physically, he found it tremendously difficult mentally. For most of us, the mental concentration needed to engage in a new movement ranks around 7 on a scale of 1 to 10. This is the cognitive stage of improving movement. During this stage, movement is not smooth and requires lots of brainpower. And at this early stage of the game, the cue “steer the leg straight” doesn’t typically work. Wes just doesn’t have the muscle memory necessary to add this new skill to his gait reflex program. Two weeks of exercises later, Wes was moving his hip more smoothly—he had laid down a few new wires. It was time to incorporate some of the movements he had practiced to become more of a full-body movement. Now when Wes is cued to steer his hips straight, he does it correctly. Instead of turning his knees out so his weight is on the outside of his foot, he maintains a strong, planted foot and moves properly from the hips. Wes feels that this movement is more correct, but it still takes some extra thought and requires a bit more work to run this way. Wes doesn’t have a large mental database of correct movement. His Plan B still feels normal, and Plan A feels forced. Remember, running is reflexive. For Wes to modify his form, he has to coordinate extra input from the brain into his normal gait pattern to control his body position while running. This is now called the associative phase of improving movement. Wes can move properly on command, but the movement is not quite fully rewired. A month into practicing the movement, Wes finds the exercise easy—almost automatic. And it shows. This is the autonomous phase. His muscles are firing, and Wes has learned to coordinate this movement into his gait. His hip alignment when running is symmetrical. He is extending his hips correctly and his pain is completely gone. We fixed a neuromuscular problem through neuromuscular training.

Let’s recap. Wes was running in pain with visible issues with his running form. The collapse of his leg was creating shear on the outside of the knee, which made his IT band angry. But what was the underlying problem that caused his leg to collapse? We know it wasn’t muscle weakness—it takes about 6 to 8 weeks for muscles to enlarge (hypertrophy) and produce more force, and Wes was better off in just four weeks. So what happened? Wes’s leg crashed inward because the muscles in his hips that stabilize and move the joint were unplugged from his CPGs. Consequently, he couldn’t steer his hip straight even if you told him how to fix it. Moving with precision requires coordinated movement—both intra- and intermuscular coordination. Intramuscular coordination is how a muscle talks to itself. A muscle is made up of lots of fibers that shorten together to produce a muscle contraction that creates movement. When the muscle is inhibited, or unplugged, not enough of these fibers get the signal to engage. To fix this, it takes very specific, even sometimes isolated, movements, to train the fibers within the muscle to talk to each other for more uniform contraction. This type of training targets muscle intelligence. Intermuscular coordination is how muscles talk to each other. You can train like a body builder and do eight sets on the leg extension machine, improving your intramuscular coordination and strength until your quads can’t fit into your jeans, but fixing one muscle won’t help you run any better. In sports, muscles don’t act in isolation the way they do on the leg extension machine—you need to train movements, not muscles. This type of training targets system intelligence.

Some people view intermuscular coordination and the work involved as crosstraining, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Research shows that neuromuscular training delivers excellent results—reducing your risk of injury and improving coordination, speed, agility, vertical jump, and contact times. This work is complementary to your running. Crosstraining describes the work runners do to keep their hearts and lungs in shape in the absence of running volume. Complementary training refines your skills and makes you a better runner. When we say muscles are unplugged, we mean they are unplugged from your default reflexive movement. This is why we focus on building coordination both within and between muscles. Through practice, neural plasticity allows us to plug these precision movements into our CPGs and convert them to autopilot for precision running form. Coordination, control, and precision are all skills that every runner needs to practice. These movements require high volume and little resistance. These skills should be practiced a couple of times every week, all season long, to ensure that the movement skill can be put to use while running. You need to own the movement. Not just in an exercise or drill, not just at mile 1, not just at mile 5. But at every repeat of your track workout, every hill effort, and every mile of your race. The end goal is to make that refined movement awareness reflexive. This is critical on race day when you need to execute the program you’ve practiced so many times over without spending your brainpower.

3 Mobility and Stability for Runability It’s 3:15 on a Wednesday afternoon. After sitting in class all day, our track team bounded onto the field about 5 minutes ago. To get the team moving we began with a warm-up. It’s pretty easy to see that Eva, Cole, Sam, and Jack aren’t squatting correctly. What we are looking for is essentially an up-and-down motion, where the ankles and knees track forward and the hips track back. However, we notice that their ankles aren’t bending. The lack of motion in their ankles is causing them to cheat somewhere else. In an effort to keep their weight over their feet, each athlete shifts backward and the spine rounds into a slump at the bottom of the squat. We conclude that the stiff ankles are limiting their form and decide to send the four athletes over to the wall for a 30-second calf stretch to get their ankles moving. When they are finished, we watch them squat again. Eva is now squatting with perfect form. But Cole, Sam, and Jack look pretty much the same. Well, one out of four isn’t bad, but we need to take a closer look at those three. We know that reflexes are only as good as the body allows them to be. In other words, the brain figures out the most efficient way to move around the problems it encounters. And any problems in the system prevent the body from moving as well as it should. Let’s look at how this plays out. Sometimes, the joint won’t move, and we need to figure out why it won’t move—we have a hardware problem. And sometimes the joint will move, but we don’t know how to move it —this is a software problem. Both of these situations create imbalances in other places of the body. Stretching, yoga, dynamic warm-ups, and foam rolling are not always the way to get this motion back. To find the right answer for your individual movement problems, you need to understand what is limiting your

mobility. From there, you can work toward safe, stable movement for your run. MOBILITY IS NOT FLEXIBILITY Flexibility is passive. You can pick up your shoe, and flex the toe box of the shoe back and forth. It can be moved, but the shoe can’t flex the toe box by itself. Mobility is active. You can actively move your own toes up and down. While it may seem like semantics, this difference is critical in how we fix blocks in a runner’s range of motion. And it’s the key to helping Cole, Sam, and Jack squat correctly. There are several reasons why a runner may lack mobility. In Eva’s case, the ankle wasn’t moving. After a 30-second stretch, the movement improved. Here’s why: You’ve got a sensation in your body called proprioception. It’s the ability to feel the positions of your joints, which is a sensory skill. This is why you can close your eyes and know whether your hand is open or clenched. Some of this sensation comes from “wires” in the joint surface and its surrounding tissue, and some comes from circuits within the muscle. These muscular circuits have names that sound important—the Golgi tendon organ and muscle spindle. These circuits are stimulated by load inside the muscle. If the strain inside the muscle gets too high, one of them turns on to tell the muscles to chill out and relax so it won’t pull too hard and tear. The other does the opposite and tells the muscle “uh-oh, pull harder right now or we are going to be in trouble!” and stimulates a stronger contraction. They work together in a feedback loop to keep muscles working together to keep you safe and your movement precise. After sitting in class all day Eva simply needed some extra time to warm up —not unlike your car engine on a cold day. Dynamic warm-ups have gained popularity in recent years, and with good reason. Some light movement, such as leg swings, hops, and other stuff we’ll get to later, effectively prepares your nervous system to move smoother. Eva’s Golgi tendons and muscle tendons were cold, so they held the muscles around her ankle tight during the initial squats. The calf stretch lengthened the calf muscles—it doesn’t take much to stimulate these two protective circuits. The circuits have a powwow and agree to stand down and allow Eva to move her ankle. This is dynamic warm-up in action. It’s not stretching (even though it’s called a calf stretch) and it’s not increasing blood flow to the muscle. Rather it resets the muscle to allow you to move smoothly. But how do we know Eva improved based on her warm-up, and

not something else? Actually, it’s really the only plausible explanation, because a 30-second “stretch” isn’t a big enough dose to cause a physical elongation of any structures around the ankle. Think of this as improving Eva’s software. MOBILITY SOFTWARE PROBLEMS You don’t look at your feet when you run. Instead you feel the position of your body. You are running down the road and you stumble on a rock. You don’t have to look down to confirm the reality that your ankle rolled out—you can feel it. In that split second, something needs to happen or you are going to sprain your ankle. There is where the cross talk between your structure, muscles, and brain, which we learned about in Chapter 1, factors in. Special nerves inside the ligaments relay a sensory phenomenon that helps us feel where our joints are; this is proprioception. This sensory input guides the way we move in real time and is relayed much faster than sight, smell, sound, or touch. The special nerves override the normal reflexive gait signals that are telling your body to push off and instead fire off a muscle sequence to quickly steer the inside of your foot safely back in line—and the ligaments outside of your ankle are forever grateful. But you may not be a normal, healthy runner. Let’s say that you are someone who sprains and rolls your ankles a lot. With every sprain, you are tearing the ligaments that surround the joint. The good news is that the ligament heals back to about 98 percent of its original strength to restore mechanical stability to the joint. But there’s some bad news, too. Those proprioceptive nerves we mentioned are torn for good. With less sensory input coming into your brain to make the micro-corrections that keep your joints safe, your ankle control becomes sloppy. When you feel wrong, you move wrong. The vast majority of ankle sprains —90 percent—occur when people roll out to the outside of the foot. If you are someone who rolls your ankles a lot, it seems that you would want to avoid

walking and running with the ankle biased toward an outward roll. Ironically, a chronic ankle sprainer keeps the ankle rolled out all of the time, even when the foot is off the ground and swinging through the air, because they can’t feel it. Luckily, the body is a little redundant in how it handles inputs. With those nerves in the ligaments torn, there’s another path to be wired. You can train the body to be more sensitive to the input it gets from the Golgi tendon and muscle spindle circuits inside the muscle and improve your feel of your ankle position. better feel of your joint position = safer joint movement It’s not just about ankle sprains. Proprioception problems affect other parts of the body in the same way. Do you know what the biggest risk factor is for an ACL tear? It’s not weakness, or genetics, or the fact that you are gluten intolerant. It’s a prior ACL tear. You tear your ACL the first time because the way you moved your body was so sloppy that you broke your parts. You failed the “safe movement test.” While you can surgically repair your ACL and make the knee more structurally stable, the research world classifies you as an athlete with “bad movement awareness.” Because you couldn’t move with precision the first time, research shows you aren’t to be trusted in the future. In fact, you have a 20–50 times higher risk of tearing an ACL in the same knee or the opposite knee as compared to normal, healthy folks. But remember, these are just odds. Odds that people earn because they don’t move well. Don’t let yourself become a statistic. Just as putting a jet engine on a paper airplane won’t make your plane fly farther, building strength on top of poor awareness isn’t the answer. Learn how to own the movement for better, safer, and more efficient control of your body. MOBILITY HARDWARE PROBLEMS In contrast to Eva’s software issue, Cole, Sam, and Jack aren’t moving because something is wrong with their hardware. We ask each of them why they can’t squat, and we get three different answers. Cole says he feel stiffness in front of his ankle. Sam says he feels tight in the back of his calf and Achilles. Jack says he is starting to get a little bit more motion with each rep, but his calves feel incredibly tight. We have three distinct hardware problems to address.

Getting unstuck Normally doors open and close. If you shove a doorstop under the door, it no longer swings freely, but it can still swing back the opposite way. Although joints are a little more complex than hinges, this is a great way to think about motion inside the joint. When joints move, they roll and glide on each other. We want to see Cole keep his foot flat on the ground so his shin can roll forward, but someone has stuck a doorstop in the front of his ankle. When the restriction you feel is on the side of the joint that is shortening it’s a sign that the joint needs to improve the way it rolls and glides. Stretching won’t work and typically causes more stiffness and pain. This is a good time to call your trusted physical therapist for some manual therapy work. In the chapters that follow, you will also find some DIY fixes to address problems with various body parts.

Lengthening tissue Sam has problems on the opposite side of the ankle. He can’t get his shin to roll forward because the parts on the backside of the joint (the calf muscles and Achilles) are too short to allow the motion. It’s like when you went to Disney World as a kid and the sign in front of Space Mountain said “you must be this tall for this ride,” and well, you just weren’t tall enough. If the soft tissue length on the back of the joint is too short to allow the joints to roll and glide, it’s time to stretch. When we stretch we are physically lengthening the tissue, tearing and ripping your muscle. It doesn’t sound like such a great thing to do, does it? This is why stretching for stretching’s sake doesn’t make sense. If something is too short, then lengthen it. Otherwise stretching doesn’t help anything, and in some situations it has been shown to impair performance. If you are a runner with a part that’s too short, it takes time to physically lengthen your body parts. A 30- second stretch isn’t enough to change tissue length. The research shows it takes about three minutes, 4 to 5 days a week, for about 10 weeks, to stretch a body part—i.e., to physically lengthen the tissue. If you need to stretch, it should always be done after your workout. We’ll use the word “stretch” only in reference to holding static stretches. And yes, we’ll look at some important stretches in Chapter 5.

Mobilizing tissue It’s time to figure out what is going on with Jack. He tells us that three days ago, he decided to run with his dad, Paul. While it was great bonding time, Paul is in peak shape and he took Jack on a hard 12-mile run in the mountains. Jack’s calves are just shredded from running too many steep inclines. Hard running breaks down the body—and then it heals. Normally the connective tissue (called fascia) in our body is in a linear arrangement that allows the muscles lying under it to slide and glide freely. But too much training volume can send the body into overdrive, laying down scar tissue as it frantically tries to repair itself. Instead of a nice linear tissue arrangement with slide and glide, you have a spiderweb with gunk and funk, otherwise called fascial restrictions. The connective tissue binds down on the underlying muscle, creating focal areas of overload. Imagine putting on a pair of your snuggest running tights. Sticking your foot in and yanking them up as hard as you can would likely strain and tear the fabric. Instead, you have to use your hands to work them up and over the contours of your leg. Likewise, trying to stretch the fascial restrictions would shift those tightly bound stress points into longer, less tightly bound stress points. The goal is to address the tissue glide restriction so those layers can slide, glide, and dissipate load so you can run healthy. Foam rollers and lacrosse balls are the rule here, and, if you are one of the lucky ones, a masseuse can be invaluable. We have Jack roll out his calf on the foam roller for a few minutes and suddenly he feels great.

We’ll highlight a few key tissue mobility moves in later chapters, but honestly, this is a problem you can solve pretty easily. If you are an endurance athlete, your body will go into hyper-repair mode at various times in the season. It’s up to you to ensure you keep your tissues supple for running. It’s worth your time to spend a few minutes each week rolling your thighs, shins, feet, or whatever feels stiff. It doesn’t take long. It’s your own personal seek-and- destroy mission to get the stiff spots moving again. So that makes four different runners. None of them moved correctly, but for completely different reasons. The same treatment doesn’t work for everybody because not everyone has the same problem. Now, a few caveats. One person might actually need more than one of these interventions. If Cole’s ankle joint has been mechanically blocked for years, it makes sense that the soft tissues in the backside of the joint would have adapted to not moving and shortened over time. So if Cole does the ankle belt mobility exercise and is suddenly moving well, then great. But after we free up the joint glide problem, we might find that moving the shin forward now produces a super tight stretch in back of the joint. This means the joint block is cleared, but we now need to lengthen the muscles on the backside of the joint that have shortened up. STABILITY IS CONTROLLED MOVEMENT

We can get runners unstuck, but that’s just half of the job. Moving without control also creates instability and injury. Try to fire a cannon from a canoe, and your wobbly canoe will sink instantly. All that force requires something to help to keep it under control. If we were looking to stabilize a canoe we could add an outrigger on each side. But this doesn’t help you as a runner—you have to build support within the system. Running throws huge loads at you whether you are ready for them or not. The only person capable of controlling those forces is you. If you can’t control your body, you’ll likely wind up like the 80 percent of runners who get hurt by running. Building control of your body can change you from a statistic into a runner. Remember that mobility is active. If a runner frees up a joint, the runner needs to learn how to use this new motion, refining the micromovement inside the joint. This comes with more proprioception training to help the body feel where it is. This sense of movement is relayed through the body to help us make a plan to move better. And this is the key difference between flexibility (passive movement) and mobility (active movement). Good mobility means the sloppy stuff is gone, and you are able to stabilize 100 percent of the movement of the joint. When we talk about stabilizing a movement, we are not referring to static stability, as in holding an isometric plank. The body is dynamic and always moving when we run, so our stability needs to be dynamic as well. This is why most of the stability exercises in this book are dynamic. After all, our end goal is not to impress our friends with a 4-minute plank, but to improve mobility while running.

Dynamic control needs to be built in all three planes of running—vertical, side-to-side, and forward-backward. If the muscles that keep the joint balanced aren’t showing up, don’t expect the movement to be balanced. We spend so much time running in the forward plane of motion that we develop relative imbalances in the muscles that steer our parts straight. We lose control and we lose precision in our movement. huge forces + unstable levers = problems Under optimal conditions, roughly half of the work required to propel you forward comes from storage and release of energy in the big rubber bands we call tendons. And when you are throwing this elasticity around, those tendons would like to have a solid foundation on which to attach. When you lack stability, tendons don’t work as well as they should. This means your muscles have to work harder to make up the difference. Building better stability around your joints helps in transferring energy across the joints and improves economy. By increasing the load on the muscle, we can decrease the load on your joints. Improving stability will tax the muscle control around the joints, but this is a good trade-off. Sloppy control around the joint creates instability and shear, which leads to premature wear and tear. Your muscles can rest and recover, but joint stress has bigger repercussions for your long-term health. When you move with precision, you own the movement. And if you own the movement, you own your running form. Your reflexes are only as good as you allow them to be, so rather than run with a second-rate Plan B movement pattern,

let’s begin fixing the underlying problems in the way you move. It’s an easy two-step plan: Step 1: Improve your joint roll and glide, tissue length, or fascial mobility to restore normal motion at the joint. Step 2: Get connected to your body to build stability within the motion.

4 Your Body Drives Your Form What does good form look like? Well, it looks like a lot of different things. Because people by nature are quite different, you aren’t going to run exactly like your training partner or the person lined up next to you at the starting line, and quite honestly, you shouldn’t. They aren’t you! Some runners are tall. Some are short. Some have long thighs and short calves. Others have short thighs and long calves. Wide hips. Narrow hips. High-arch feet. Flat feet. There are people built like The Rock. And people built like an Olsen twin. We can’t possibly expect everyone to land with the exact same knee angle, or elbow angle, or footstrike position. Different is the norm in people and different is the norm in form. Even though we don’t have a one-size-fits-all running formula, we do have some basic goals for good running form. Your running form should be 1) as economical as possible at a given speed, 2) as stress-free as possible, and 3) as symmetrical as possible. Let’s dig a bit deeper.

GOAL 1: RUNNING ECONOMY This is defined as the energy required to run a certain speed. It’s a little like fuel efficiency in a car: A vehicle with better gas mileage, measured in miles per gallon (mpg), can go farther on the same amount of fuel than a car with lower mpg. If you improve your running economy, you can run faster at the same perceived effort and lower energy expenditure. Ideally, about half the work required to run comes from active muscle contraction and the other half comes from stored elasticity in the tendon. Think about a slingshot—you can’t fire the rock unless you cock it back first. From foot contact until midstance (when the foot is directly under the body), energy is stored in the tendons. From midstance until push-off, we fire the rock. This stored energy is released to help drive us forward. Improving running economy is all about capitalizing on elastic recoil to save our muscles. There are quite a few things that can boost your running economy, but form stands out. Specifically posture alignment and where your foot contacts the ground in relation to your body affect the use of your elasticity. As a general rule, you want to maintain a neutral spine position and strike the ground as close to your body as you can for a given pace. GOAL 2: LOW-STRESS RUNNING

The stress-per-stride that your body endures when running is driven by two main factors. And, interestingly, it’s these two factors that are responsible for essentially all of the sport’s overuse injuries. Loading rate Runners who land with their foot too far in front of their body, called overstriding, are often overwhelmed by the loading rate. Why? The 250 percent body weight load they must deal with on each stride ramps up too quickly. If they keep doing this for miles on end, their bodies break. And keep on breaking. Let’s consider how this works with a common overuse injury. Stress fractures in the front of the shin (tibia) are typically a result of two distinct issues. In terms of gait, the runner is overstriding, throwing load at the body too quickly. And on top of that, the runner typically has a stiff foot that doesn’t do a good job at absorbing shock. Consequently, all that excess load goes right up into the shin. Put these problems together and you’ve got a perfect recipe for overload—and a stress fracture. To help this runner, we would need to first get his foot working so it can do its job of dissipating the stress with less trauma channeled up to the shin. Then we’d work to achieve foot contact closer to the body. For those of you who like numbers: Let’s say Keith is running with a loading rate of 7,500 Newtons/second (N/s) and we improve his gait to achieve a number in the range of 5,000 N/s. This means he has roughly 33 percent less tissue strain on his body with every stride for all his weekly mileage. Win. Fixing the foot and bringing the point of contact closer to the body require strategies revealed in Chapter 10. We All Land in Front of Center It’s commonly said that you should “land with your foot under your center of mass” but unless you are accelerating, it is physically impossible to land with your foot directly under your center of mass. I can bring to my lab any form guru or any runner from any school of running bias and demonstrate that at steady-state speed every single runner on planet Earth contacts in front of his or her center of mass. It is true that contacting too far out in front of you, or overstriding, is bad for a number of reasons—namely that it increases the mechanical stress of running and hurts economy. However, landing slightly in front of your center of mass is good because it allows us to store energy in the tendon,

thereby reducing the force you need to generate with your muscles. Do you want to know what it’s like to run without the storage and release of energy in the tendon? Try sprinting. When you sprint, the time on the ground is so short that the elasticity can’t be absorbed and then rebound. This is why you need to take a break after sprinting for 100 meters. Elasticity is the reason you can run all day at an easy pace. Landing on the Forefoot There is a contingent still pushing the message that runners must land on the forefoot. I’ll share with you some reconnaissance on that topic. Years ago, I was invited to a barefoot running event in New York City. This was a passionate group of runners who considered running shoes to be an unnecessary evil. They preached that unless you were running on your forefoot, you were running wrong. A friend of mine planted a video camera in the bushes and filmed these runners as they went by. Among this group of highly passionate runners, over half of them were not landing on the forefoot. Most of them were closer to midfoot and a surprising number of runners were landing on the heel. Footstrike is worth talking about. However, it’s one tree in a big forest. Making contact on the forefoot can greatly decrease loading rate, but it costs extra energy to run this way. Additionally, research has shown that most runners will change their footstrike as they fatigue, and pace and running surface play a big role here as well. Consequently, I typically don’t cue a foot landing position. It’s best to just let it happen naturally. It’s much more important where the foot contacts in relation to your body, than where you make contact on your foot.

Instability Runners must stabilize the forces acting on them in all three planes of motion. If they can’t control their position, things get wobbly. It’s normal to have some side-to-side wobble, and it’s a part of the normal shock-absorption strategy of a healthy gait. However, when people can’t stabilize their parts, we see their entire body start to wobble too much and with too much variability. Let’s take another look at a stress fracture developing in the shin. However, this time there’s a completely different reason for this diagnosis—the runner’s foot coordination is off. Since muscles inside the foot aren’t firing, the muscle that decelerates the foot on the shin is forced to work much harder than it needs to. The overworked muscle yanks on the shin bone and eventually cracks the outer wall of the bone right off. In this situation, the primary goal is to improve the coordination and control of muscles inside the foot so the body can maintain its alignment and position when running. Next, we need to look around the rest of the body to see if we can identify any red flags that indicate the runner is unstable and making the body work too hard. (You will find out how to spot these in later chapters.) High body stress, either due to lack of shock absorption or instability, can cause tissues to be overloaded. The goal in both of these situations is to ensure that we improve form to make running less stressful, and to get your body parts to work together properly to control your movement and reduce the stress per stride. GOAL 3: SYMMETRY Some people are left-handed, and some people are right-handed. You have better fine motor skill on one hand to write and draw. No problem here. And those of you who played soccer likely noticed that your goal shots and passes were more